Whether the USA is a peace-loving country becomes not a mere theoretico-historical or an abstract issue but a very down to earth political question as the November presidential election in that country approaches. President George W. Bush and his closest collaborators are indisputably war hawks. John Kerry, his nearly certain Democratic opponent, must tailor his electoral strategy to the mood of American voters. Are these hawkish or are they, after the Iraq experience, disposed to repudiate the present administration's aggressive stance on international issues? What does history reveal?

In the last two hundred years America has waged or intervened in fourteen major and minor wars. After independence, the first war the USA fought was its prolonged but intermittent conflict with the Barbary States of northern Africa (1800-1815), commemorated in the Marines' anthem's opening lines: "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli..." (Incidentally, the Americans were repulsed in Tripoli but got their own back in Algiers.)

Even as the Barbary Wars were going on, the USA attacked Canada in 1812 as a reaction to British obstruction of its commerce with continental Europe, then a Napoleonic empire. The British burned the White House but were defeated in New Orleans (after peace had been accorded unwitting to the combatants).

The USA attacked Mexico and annexed the major part of what today are the western American states (1846-1848). Mexico was a weak power and the spoils to be had were irresistible, especially as California was already settled mainly by Americans.

The American civil war (1861-1865) was the costliest war in human lives the USA ever fought. Nothing that happened in Europe could compare with it in savagery. Savage also was the war that the USA waged against Native American "savages", although this only engaged regiments occasionally and hardly qualifies as a real war.

As it was pure and unjustified American aggression, the Spanish-American war is a misnomer. It was, as Theodore Roosevelt put it, a "splendid little war". Bush the younger is an admirer of Roosevelt's speeches, which he has on a coffee table in his Crawford, Texas, ranch house.

The USA was provoked into entering World War I by unrestricted German submarine warfare. Germany succumbed after the American intervention.

America leaned hard on Japan, an aggressor power, and entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Without the USA, the issue of that war in 1941 was unpredictable.

The USA fought off North Korean aggression with full UN backing. This ended communist dreams of unopposed world-wide military expansion.

The Vietnam war was also part of communist containment, although the issue here was not as clear-cut as in Korea. It is generally conceded that the American intervention was as misguided as it was unsuccessful.

The Reagan administrations engaged in proxy wars in Nicaragua and in Afghanistan. In 1983, Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada to oust Cuban intromission in that tiny island country.

Under president Jimmy Carter in 1977 the USA had agreed to transfer the Panamá canal in 1999. In 1989, president George H.W. Bush invaded Panamá to overthrow its dictator Manuel Noriega, suspected of drug-trafficking.

In 1991, under the same Bush, the USA organized a multinational, UN-sanctioned coalition to liberate Kuwait, which had been annexed by Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, in 1990. The USA and its allies used both maximum force and maximum restraint.

President Bill Clinton engaged in a misconceived invasion of Somalia, but it was hardly a war and it was terminated when it became pointless.

The USA was attacked by the Islamic fanatical Al Qaida terror organization in 2001 and president George W. Bush retaliated with war and invasion of Afghanistan. With Pakistani help, this war was brief and to the point, although its main objectives, the capture of Osama bin Laden and the dismantling of al Qaida, were not achieved.

Finally, with minimal provocation, Bush launched all out aerial warfare against Iraq in June 2002, which culminated with invasion in March 2003 and the subsequent precarious occupation of the country.

By way of comparison during the same 200 years covered by this overview,  Great Britain, the greatest imperialist power in history, fought the last Napoleonic war, the War of 1812, the Crimean war, the Boer war, World War I, World War II, the Korean war, the Falklands war, and the Second Iraqi war. In all nine states of war, not counting the countless colonialist operations undertaken by Britain, which were not strictly speaking formal wars.

Prussia/Germany, an aggressor state par excellence, fought six formal wars: as Prussia, two Napoleonic wars, war against Denmark, war against Austria, and war against France; and as Germany, World War I and World War II. During the same period of time the USA fought almost as many formal wars as Great Britain and Germany combined.

War and politics in America

What about the public's attitudes to the wars America has fought? The Barbary wars were not much of a political issue. But the War of 1812 and the war against México had definite popular support. The Civil war was a war of survival and the northern states gave it nearly total political backing. The war against Spain was imperialistic and aroused the same enthusiasm in America as the Boer war did in Britain.

Under president Woodrow Wilson, America was edging towards the Allies in World War I. War was declared during the second Wilson administration. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was eager for war against the Axis. He was re-elected in 1940. After the Japanese attacked, America accepted war with courage and resolution.

The Korean war was seen as necessary by president Harry Truman and there is little doubt that the public was with him. The Korean stalemate produced some disenchantment, but Truman could not run again and Americans chose Dwight D. Eisenhower as president, a war leader who was trusted either to end the war honorably or to carry it on successfully.

At no time in the twelve years it lasted for America did the American public actually vote against the war in Vietnam. It did not oppose the "drift" towards full-scale war under president John F. Kennedy or his successor, president Lyndon F. Johnson. There was probably a greater chance that Hubert Humphrey would have stopped the Vietnam war than that Richard M. Nixon, who was elected in 1968, would. In 1972, it wasn't at all clear where Nixon was going, but everyone knew that the Democrat George McGovern was dead set against the war. Americans elected Nixon.

Reagan's proxy wars and his invasion of Grenada (not to mention his challenging of the Soviet "evil empire") occurred during his first administration, and Reagan was re-acclaimed to a second term. The Gulf War occurred in 1991 and it was not a campaign issue when Clinton defeated Bush in 1992.

Bush the younger was a president without a real electoral mandate. He began his presidency on the cocky note of the "axis of evil", which he got wrong to start with by not including Afghanistan. Once 9/11 happened, Bush became the hawkiest president in American history and the public went right along with him.

The Second Iraqi war was internationally execrated but American voters demonstrated conclusively that they backed Bush. (It appears that a majority of Americans believed, and still believe despite sufficient evidence to the contrary, that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had to do with the downing of the Twin Towers.) The sequel of the war has brought with it some misgiving, but Bush is still popular and will probably be re-elected. American history, in sum, demonstrates that no war has ever been politically detrimental to any American presidential incumbent seeking re-election.

God bless America

Having said all this, it is imperative to recognize the debt the world owes to America's wars. The USA contributed decisively to the defeat of Nazi Germany. At the same time, it put an end to Japanese imperialism and its accompanying atrocities. These facts changed the course of world history in a profound and permanent constructive direction.

It was again America that, when no other nation could, stopped Stalinist aggrandizing dead on its tracks. It was thus America that left communist tyranny to wither on the vine. The USA has made many historical blunders, but in the balance what hope for peace and prosperity there is in the world at large is due crucially to America. Without America, world history, to say it all, could easily have turned into an unimaginable nightmare. Perhaps democracy, in the wide sense of what is good for humanity, would in the end have survived without America's wars, but it would have done so only at an incalculable cost that the USA spared the world.